At times, you’ll hear someone moaning on about the good ol’ days as if it were some kind of easier pre-industrialized romantic time. Thomas Thwaites chronicles his attempt at making that time-tested convenience-reference, the toaster, from scratch. Created literally from the ground up, he began digging up the raw materials from abandoned mines around the UK; attempting to process them himself at home and finally forming them into a product that can be bought for just under £10.00. After nine months of work and using just five materials – iron, copper, mica, nickel and plastic – instead of the 100 or so used in a shop-bought version, the final cost to him was £1187.54. The laboriousness of producing even the most basic material from the ground up exposes the fallacy of that “olden days” romance mentioned earlier. It’s an electrical appliance that disavows the infrastructure on which it relies. A convenient item that rejects the convenience of consumerism. Thwaites says, “At a moment in time when the effects of industry are no longer trivial in relation to the wider environment, the throwaway toasters of today seem unreasonable. The provenance and the fate of the things we buy is too important to ignore.”
